IBM recently announced that SJ®, Sweden’s largest rail operator, is turning to customer experience management software from IBM to improve its mobile and online booking process and overall online customer experience to increase ticket sales.

IBM's customer experience management (CEM) solutions are helping SJ to understand, identify, and eliminate consumer pain points on online and mobile channels. Visualization and analytics tools designed to help businesses understand and keep pace with the rapidly shifting preferences of today’s increasingly digital consumers are part of IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative to help maximize the value of every single customer visit (web and mobile) and ensuring that more transactions are completed successfully.

Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, SJ transports more than 100,000 passengers every day, with more than 50 percent of passenger bookings completed online. However, during an initial investigation, SJ discovered that more than 230,000 customers annually were experiencing difficulties when booking online travel with a credit card, which ultimately impacted ticket sales.

IBM Placed in Leaders Quadrant by Leading Analyst Firm for IBM MobileFirst

IBM recently announced that Gartner has positioned IBM as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms.[i]

The new report places IBM in the Leaders Quadrant, as measured by completeness of vision and execution ability of IBM Worklight, IBM’s mobile application development platform. Acquired by IBM in February 2012, IBM Worklight is a member of the IBM MobileFirst family of solutions. In just one year, IBM has advanced from the Niche Quadrant to the Leaders Quadrant.

This announcement follows a string of strong showings for IBM MobileFirst services and software capabilities, including IBM Worklight, in Gartner Magic Quadrants this summer. In July, IBM was named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing.[ii] IBM is also named a visionary in Magic Quadrants for Managed Mobility Services[iii] and Mobile Device Management[iv].

According to the report, as this market reaches early mainstream status, Gartner expects Leaders to be profitable, and to present lower risk and consistently high project results as the market begins to consolidate and competition grows. Leaders must not only be good at cross-platform development and deployment, but also have a good vision of the multichannel enterprise, support for standards, a solid understanding of IT requirements, and scalable channels and partnerships to market. Leaders must provide platforms that are easy to purchase, program, deploy and upgrade. Leaders can focus primarily on either business-to-consumer or business-to-enterprise, but vision and execution scores are higher for vendors that can cover both use cases today.

Scientists from IBM recently unveiled a breakthrough software ecosystem designed for programming silicon chips that have an architecture inspired by the function, low power, and compact volume of the brain. The technology could enable a new generation of intelligent sensor networks that mimic the brain’s abilities for perception, action, and cognition.

Google, IBM, Mellanox, NVIDIA and Tyan recently announced plans to form the OpenPOWER Consortium – an open development alliance based on IBM's POWER microprocessor architecture. The Consortium intends to build advanced server, networking, storage and GPU-acceleration technology aimed at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next-generation, hyperscale and cloud data centers.

The move makes POWER hardware and software available to open development for the first time as well as making POWER IP licensable to others, greatly expanding the ecosystem of innovators on the platform. The consortium will offer open-source POWER firmware, the software that controls basic chip functions. By doing this, IBM and the consortium can offer unprecedented customization in creating new styles of server hardware for a variety of computing workloads.

Scientists from IBM recently unveiled a breakthrough software ecosystem designed for programming silicon chips that have an architecture inspired by the function, low power, and compact volume of the brain. The technology could enable a new generation of intelligent sensor networks that mimic the brain’s abilities for perception, action, and cognition.

Google, IBM, Mellanox, NVIDIA and Tyan recently announced plans to form the OpenPOWER Consortium – an open development alliance based on IBM's POWER microprocessor architecture. The Consortium intends to build advanced server, networking, storage and GPU-acceleration technology aimed at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next-generation, hyperscale and cloud data centers.

The move makes POWER hardware and software available to open development for the first time as well as making POWER IP licensable to others, greatly expanding the ecosystem of innovators on the platform. The consortium will offer open-source POWER firmware, the software that controls basic chip functions. By doing this, IBM and the consortium can offer unprecedented customization in creating new styles of server hardware for a variety of computing workloads.

The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), the non-profit organization charged with supporting the development, distribution and adoption of open-source software for use in robotics research, education and product development, recently relied on SoftLayer Technologies to host the DARPA Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC). SoftLayer, now an IBM company, provided the multi-faceted infrastructure of bare metal, cloud and high-performance GPU servers to help push the boundaries of robotics technology. OSRF was funded by DARPA to support the simulator-based event, part of the broader DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC).

Competitors in the VRC sought to develop software to enable a simulated robot to execute tasks similar to the activities that might be required of emergency personnel in a disaster response situation. The VRC drew more than 100 teams from around the world, and SoftLayer’s uniquely customizable cloud platform allowed them to compete from remote locations. The winners of the virtual competition will move on to the next stage of the DRC, in which the software they tested during the VRC will be applied to physical robots during a live event.

Once again, IBM has been ranked number one worldwide in market share for consolidated Application Management Services (AMS), according to IT analyst firm International Data Corporation (IDC).

The ranking, based on revenue, was revealed in IDC’s recently published report Worldwide and U.S. Application Management Services 2012 Vendor Shares: IDC’s Top 10 Vendors. Since the inception of the report in 2007, IBM has earned the number one ranking in consolidated AMS market share. Consolidated AMS includes both the discrete and bundled categories of AMS.

The IDC evaluation concluded that IBM again led in consolidated AMS revenue, offering market-leading integrated and discrete service options to help clients address efficiency, cost, and portfolio modernization options.

IBM is accelerating its Linux on Power initiative with a new high-performance PowerLinux server as well as new software and middleware applications geared for the growing number of clients embracing big data, analytics and next generation Java applications in an open cloud environment.

"More clients are choosing IBM’s Power Systems designed to handle mission critical and complex cloud and big data workloads in an open Linux environment," said Doug Balog, General Manager for IBM Power Systems. "Responding to this need, we are aggressively investing in our open ecosystem -- including new products, applications and collaborations -- that support today's emerging Linux workloads.”